What changed was not the story.

What changed was who was listening.

In the 1990s and 2000s, as scholars of Native American history increasingly worked in partnership with Indigenous communities rather than simply extracting information from them, stories like Buffalo Calf Road Woman’s began to move into the public record.

Researchers who understood that oral tradition was a form of historical evidence, that Indigenous testimony deserved the same serious engagement as any other source, began to assemble a more complete picture of what had happened at the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn.

This more complete picture does not diminish the American soldiers who fought and died in those battles.

It does not simplify the history into pure heroes and villains.

It adds.

It enriches.

It gives us more of the truth.

And the truth it gives us — that a Cheyenne woman named Buffalo Calf Road Woman rode into battle at the Rosebud, that her community named that battle after her courage, that she was present at Little Bighorn and remembered by her people as having played a central role in the most significant battle of the Indian Wars — is not a footnote.